Rejoice, fellow Wizards

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Wizard

Volley spells are now much more sustainable as a primary source of damage.
Multiple wizards can now play more easily together, as they have their own individual stacks for Reclaim Magic using the new Spark of Magic system described below.
Seal of Magic
While Seal of Magic is active, your Evocation spells still activate Mark of Magic, and your harmful spells now also leave Sparks of Magic on your target.
Mark of Magic
Mark of Magic works as before and is shared by everyone. It increases all Spell Damage the target takes by 2% per stack, up to five stacks, for 1 minute. Reclaim Magic no longer consumes it, so the damage bonus stays up while your group keeps casting.
Spark of Magic
Spark of Magic is new and belongs to the Wizard who left it. Your spells leave more Sparks the more Mana they cost, and Volleys leave the most. Sparks last 1 minute, lower the target's Maximum Mana slightly, and can't be dispelled.
Reclaim Magic
Reclaim Magic now consumes your own Sparks and returns Mana based on how many you had. It no longer has a cooldown, and grants your party Arcane Acceleration if you don't already have it.
Reclaim Magic can't use another Wizard's Sparks, and another Wizard can't use yours. With more than one Wizard in the group, every Wizard can build and reclaim on the same target without taking stacks from each other.
Arcane Volley and Fire Volley
Arcane Volley and Fire Volley now hit five times at every rank, and their damage per hit is about the same as before. Reclaiming after a full Volley returns more Mana than it cost, so alternating Volley and Reclaim Magic lets you keep casting while slowly regaining Mana.

Triven

Curious if longtimers feel like this helps address the issues they've been seeing or if it still needs more?

heybats

This SOUNDS like the right direction. Can’t wait to try it later. Do we expect mediating to be more efficient while volley/reclaim to retune at least some mana when sitting is not an option?

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Early levels will feel much much better if the first Arcane Volley is 5 hits at the same damage instead of 2.

For later levels, I suppose it depends on how mana positive the volley -> reclaim cycle is.

If we go by current numbers Exceptional Fire Volley is 60 mana. Reclaim at max level is 25 mana per stack. So each cycle nets you 65 mana while doing 51dps base (without INT scaling and Mark scaling). 5 seconds to channel the missiles + cast time (and GCD? Can't remember if reclaim is on GCD) of reclaim. It's at least 6 seconds per cycle, if not 7 or 7.5 seconds (also can't remember if reclaim is 1 second or 1.5 second cast).

That seems extremely close to top end meditate numbers, but people like Nyx who were able to stomach the wizard far longer than some of us would have to chime in.

Taron

I wonder if anything beyond this was tweaked in terms of numbers? I was still hoping for some of the spells to be bumped to lower levels again so 1-20 isn't so barren compared to other classes, but honestly any Wizard tweaks at all is a welcome boon at this point!

In addition to that, I lamented about it feeling like the classic med+nuke play style is dead now rather than a play style choice, and did get this dev response from Xilith (though he's not the Wizard designer, Jahaar is, to be clear):

As it was explained to me, you should be able to either use 1 efficient nuke per mob and sit OR volley/reclaim to some kind of similar effect.

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Taron

I would guess there will be further number tweaks in the future if that's what they are going for.

Top-end wizards were "nuking for around 2700" according to Nyx. If we assume a 30 second TTK, that's about 90 DPS (assuming no resists, which we know isn't possible so the actual number is probably 10-20% lower because of resist rates and partials). Spellblades and Beastmasters were reporting 200+ sustained DPS, misses and all at the top-end.

The quicker the TTK they shoot for; the better the one nuke and sit wizard looks. The longer; the worse, while those other classes don't really mind how short or long the fight is.

We also know that just spamming Volley won't reach close to those dps numbers either (and we shouldn't match them in sustained anyway, but that's still quite the delta).

However....If you can Volley + Reclaim cycle AND drop one nuke per mob that would be far far more reasonable a delta between us and actual sustained classes as far as sustained output. That would however make the med and nuke playstyle obviously obsolete except for just not wanting to do the other way.

We'll just have to see if they've tweaked the numbers on any of these things as well.

Fidric

your real rejoicing should also be on the adjustment to spell scroll pricing too

"0.30.2.1 - Module 1 Patch 4 - Release Patch!"

Spell scroll prices

We've reworked how spell and ability scrolls are priced so that every class spends the same amount to learn its full kit.

The old prices were set per level, so a scroll cost about the same no matter who bought it. That sounds fair until you count the scrolls. A wizard has far more abilities to learn than a monk, so a wizard ended up paying roughly four times as much to buy everything. We couldn't find a good reason for that - A wizard isn't more powerful than a monk, doesn't need less gear, and doesn't earn more money along the way.

Now each 5-level range has a set total cost that's the same for every class. For levels 1-5, buying all of your scrolls costs 4sp 5cp, whether that's 6 scrolls or 24. If your class has lots of scrolls in a range, each one is cheaper. If it has only a few, each one costs more, but everyone spends the same total.

Within a range, earlier scrolls cost less than later ones, so your level 1 scrolls are cheaper than your level 5 scrolls.

A few scrolls are shared between classes, like Gate. Those have one price for everyone, set low enough to fit every class that uses them.

This does create some eye-catching prices at high level, where some melee classes only get one or two new abilities in a range. We have built the game with the expectation that all classes should be competitive and useful with their full kit, so pricing those to require equal spend feels like a sensible choice.

Maple

Hmm, couple of those things sound really good on paper and is a move in the right direction.
Hope the class got fixed - i want to play a wizard alt 🙂

WhiskyJack

Do Sparks of Magic cap at 5? Assuming it does...also will need to see if Reclaim is AE or single target. Will make a difference for quad kiting if nothing else changes with mana efficiency of our damage spells.

Cadveun

Taron As it was explained to me, you should be able to either use 1 efficient nuke per mob and sit OR volley/reclaim to some kind of similar effect.

One nuke per mob doesn’t do a high enough percentage of the mobs health, especially vs reds. I think on average one nuke does about 20 percent of a yellow’s health. If you as the primary DPS are only doing 18-20 percent of a mobs health, who is expected to do the rest. Hopefully we can do the nuke and then do this volley reclaim cycle to get it up to 33% or higher per mob.

Taron

Cadveun He was just stating what the goal is for Wizard design - that doesn't mean that's how it currently works in practice.

While using Volley you aren't sitting and meditating and thus aren't getting as much meditate mana. So if they balance the numbers with this goal in mind, meditating should still get you mana back at a faster rate than Volley->Reclaim does (at the cost of DPS for not using Volley while you are meditating). But that extra mana should allow you to use your efficient nuke more often. Thus, if the numbers are balanced right, it ought to be able to work out that constant Volley->Reclaim is slightly higher DPS than med->Nuke for those that want a more active playstyle, but med->nuke is still close enough that you can get away with doing just that if you prefer lower APM for a slightly lower sustained damage output.

That's how Jahaar originally outlined it back right after the Deep Dive (or at least that's what it sounded like he was saying to me), but the changes in this patch made me wonder if they had dropped that concept entirely, which is why I was bugging the devs about it today. Xilith's reply indicates to me that, as far as he knows, it is still the goal that just meditate + efficient nukes should be decently close to the same overall output as volley->reclaim repeatedly.

All that said, Xilith is not in charge of the Wizard class (unless, now that the reworks are finally done, they are changing around the whole this-dev-gets-this-class thing or swapping who gets what), so it would be nice to get a definite confirmation from whomever (Jahaar I assume) is now in charge of balancing Wizards that this is still the goal (or if it's supposed to already work that way now, which we can then test and report back on that).

millsydoo

Does the wizard have big boomy spells? I want to drop bombs on my wizard. Is this possible?

Cadveun

Ah very well, sorry misunderstood. That would indeed be ideal. Hoping for Comets or meteors eventually that can do this.

Gozno

Mortimer, we’re back!

Ooligad

Honestly, in theory this is all i really wanted. I'm sure it will need some tweaking but this looks like the days of sit wizard are over. My criticism was pretty harsh about the changes, so I need to be fair and say this on top of the scarwood portal is all I really wanted as a wizard to be able to really cook again. thanks devs!

We are so back!

Gozno

WhiskyJack we shall see! If sparks occur on AOE targets and Reclaim is capable of grabbing all sparks? Then quad is back.

Nefarius

We've been asking for this for so long, hard to believe its actually real

Raybane

Taron There is also no particular reason that you can't do a mix of volley and meditate as it's still beneficial to your big nukes to set them up with volley for marks.

Taron

Raybane True - it would make sense to do volley->nuke->sit to get Marks up before the nuke, and now with this change you'd obviously want to extend that to volley->reclaim->nuke->sit since the marks will stay up with reclaim so it's basically just recovering the cost of applying marks.

I think the comparison being talked about was volley->reclaim->volley->reclaim->volley->reclaim until mob is dead, only really using other nukes for a burn-down situation, and only sitting when there's nothing to attack. Or even volley->reclaim->nuke->volley->reclaim->nuke etc. If this gets you damage while also being close to or exceeding the mana during that time you'd get with meditate, why would you ever stop using volley and reclaim over and over as much as possible?

Volley->nuke->reclaim->sit once per mob is still 3 actions instead of 1 per random mob as I would prefer, but if that works it would definitely still be better than the amount of buttons a lot of other classes have to push for their "rotation" (and less button spam but more time to chat/plan/etc is what drew me to Wizard and Cleric in the first place, both of which are higher APM now than what they used to be after all the complaining that sit-and-cast was "boring").

Ooligad

Taron nah, volley all day!